The china at the electronic-spy agency's dining room was exquisite, as was the meal. Ron Rivest, inventor of the RSA approach to public cryptography, and I were having lunch with the National Security Agency's director, Bobby Inman. We were trying to impress on him that the forthcoming growth of the Information Marketplace would create severe privacy problems and the agency should extend the role of cryptography from ensuring secure communications within the U.S. government (and breakable ones outside it) to protecting the privacy of U.S. citizens and organizations, with approaches like RSA. The admiral didn't believe us-our claims of a widely interconnected civilian world in the '90s sounded like pie in the sky. Twenty-five years later, in April 1999, at the other extreme, The Economist proclaimed on its cover "The End of Privacy."

Under-reaction then! Over-reaction now!